A group of motherboard enthusiasts working for GIGABYTE, sharing their insider knowledge and general ramblings of the motherboard business, the tech industry, latest technologies and trends, and other random odds and ends.

Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Case modding is growing in popularity as many look to create that finishing touch on their PC to make it unique and original. The possibilities are really infinite, some people want a complete redesign of their case while others just want to add an enhanced water cooling solution.

Regardless of how extensive you want your case mod to be, you will need one thing: light. Without illumination you can't appreciate the clean cable runs, elaborate water cooling setups, or simply the components themselves.

GIGABYTE has a solution: LED lights along the motherboard. On select GIGABYTE 100 series models, including the Gaming G1, there is a multi-color LED trace path around the board. With the Ambient LED app in the GIGABYTE APP center you can customize the light pattern, with three different options, and seven different color options.

With all the color and light pattern options the possibilities are endless. The LED lights can compliment case mods or additions like high-end coolers, illuminating them so you can show them off. Or simply on their own they can provide a cool, custom look for your rig.

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

MacOS X has a loyal following, even among PC users. While many PC users, especially enthusiasts, would never buy an Apple computer because of the price premium they command and lack of upgradeability it would be hard to find someone that won't admit even a slight affinity for OS X.

But unfortunately for PC loving fans of OS X, Apple has ruled out ever officially licensing its operating system to PC vendors. However there is a solution if you want to run OS X on your PC: build a CustoMac.

A CustoMac is a PC that the user builds specifically for running OS X. TonyMacx86 is one of the largest communities on the web dedicated to building CustoMacs. Recently we covered their guide on how to turn a GIGABYTE Brix-S into a CustoMac-mini. Of course not all PC hardware is compatible with OS X, so TonyMacx86 has put together an extensive guide to show you what you need to build your very own CustoMac.

If you have an interest in running OS X on your PC, head on over to to TonyMac x86 now to check out the guide. You'll notice that GIGABYTE motherboards are extensively supported!

The average PC refresh cycle is getting longer and longer. While at one time a person was likely to refresh their PCs every two-to-three years, this cycle has stretched on to now be between five to seven years. While hardcore gamers might update their hardware on a 12 month cycle, the average person that doesn't have a budget to do yearly upgrades might still be using hardware form 2010.

And for the average person this might work -- but it won't work well. While hardware from 2010 might be able to play 2015's latest games, it will only do so with choppy frame rates at the lowest resolutions and graphics settings. This is far from an enjoyable gaming experience, and is not how the developers intended the games to be played.

Just to show you the performance advantage a modern system featuring an Intel® 6th. Gen™ CPU, DDR4 RAM, an Intel 750-series SSD, a GIGABYTE WindForce GeForce 980 Ti graphics card on a GIGABYTE Z170X-Gaming G1 motherboard has over a system with a 2010-era high-end hardware we've prepared a video demonstrating the vast difference in performance. As you will see, our benchmarking of the resource demanding Grand Theft Auto V and the benchmark suite Catzilla shows that the 2010-era system struggles while the GIGABYTE G1 Gaming motherboard based system has no problem.

Building a 2015 gaming machine

For the benchmarking tests we chose to put together a system that would represent what an average user would be after if they wanted to build a high-end system. Of course, there are those that have the budget for an extreme system with multiple graphics cards and extensive watercooling systems but many gamers simply don't have the budget for that and want high-end gaming at an affordable price.

Let's go through the parts used in building the PC and why we chose them.

GIGABYTE 100 Series Motherboard: For this video we used the GIGABYTE Z170X-Gaming G1 motherboard, the flagship Gaming motherboard of GIGABYTE's 100 Series lineup. The Gaming G1 motherboard has many high-end features that set it miles apart from the competition.

For audiophiles looking to game with crystal-clear sound the Gaming G1 motherboard has a Creative® Sound Core3D™ Quad-Core audio processor with a Burr-Brown high end 127 dB DAC which is Creative® certified ZxRi 120+dB SNR . For those with an interest in overclocking, the GIGABYTE Z170X-Gaming G1 board features enhanced BCLK frequency tuning, allowing overclockers to make adjustments outside of the traditional 5% straps. In addition, for gamers that play online, lag is a thing of the past: this board features the lag-killing Killer DoubleShot-X3™ Pro which intelligently routes traffic over the board's available connections ensuring that online games run silky smooth even as downloads continue in the background.

While this motherboard might be right for someone with a bigger budget for a system build, there's also the GIGABYTE Z170X-Gaming 7 or the Z170X-Gaming 3 for those that need to stay within a smaller budget. All of these GIGABYTE's 100 Series motherboards support the latest Intel 6th.® Gen™ CPU, DDR4 RAM, feature onboard USB Type-C™ and have other innovative and award-winning GIGABYTE features.

Intel 6th. Gen CPU: For those wanting the best in price-performance, there's no better choice than an Intel 6th. Gen CPU. As you can see in the video it offers double-digit performance gains over a CPU from the last generation. Under the lid Intel has made improvements to the micro architecture to make it more efficient.

One of the things Intel has improved is the processor's ability to fetch and dispatch up to six instructions at once and store up to 224 instructions in its out-of-order buffer at once (up from 192 in Haswell).

In addition, it has enhanced support for DDR4, support for USB 3.1 over USB Type C, and better baseclock tuning for enhanced overclocking support.

DDR4 RAM: First supported on Intel fifth-generation CPUs, DDR4 is the latest generation of RAM offering a range of improvements over over DDR2 and DDR3.

The primary advantages of DDR4 is that is offers higher speeds -- between 800 to 1600 MHz -- than DDR3 which had a maximum frequency of 1067 MHz, as well as it runs at a lower voltage.

The big speed increases that DDR4 offers makes it a must have for any gamer looking to get the most out of his system.

Intel 750 Series SSD: Over the past five years SSDs have gone down in price dramatically while increasing in speed and storage. Now, the cost per gigabyte of an SSD is getting to be very competitive to an HDD for the average user (with the cost/GB approaching $1). SSDs are faster than HDDs because they use something called non-volatile NAND memory instead of a magnetic platter and actuator arm. On average, a PCIe-based SSD will offer a 4X speed improvement over an HDD. For a more detailed explainer of the differences between an HDD and SSD, you can check out this post from PC Mag.

For our system we used the Intel 750 Series SSD. This SSD fits right into the motherboard's PCI-e slot, and uses a controller protocol developed by Intel called Non-Volatile Memory Express (commonly shortened as NVMe). Benchmarks published online show that the SSD can push 2.4GB/sec of read and 1.2GB/sec of write bandwidth. For gamers this means that demanding games (such as Grand Theft Auto V which we tested) can run at a better FPS as the system has faster access to the game's data and high-resolution textures.

It's time to upgrade

While many users might think that their 2010 era PC is good enough, that's simply not the case. Yes it might be able to struggle with running some games, but you won't be able to appreciate them to their full extent. You'll need to run the games at their lowest resolution and lowest graphics settings, which is hardly the way they were meant to be played.

Wednesday, September 9, 2015

We understand that some users are having trouble installing Windows 7 by USB drive on their systems that have a GIGABYTE 100 series motherboard inside.

The problem lies in the fact that Windows 7's installer is only compatible with an older type of USB driver. The GIGABYTE 100 series motherboard uses a newer kind of USB driver, meaning you will get an error when trying to install Windows 7.

Thankfully there is a fix for this which allows you to package the updated driver on to your USB driver.

In order to build the patched version of Windows 7, you'll need a few things:

Once you download the Windows Image Tool from GIGABYTE the process is fairly easy. Here's the process you need to follow step-by-step:

1) Open the tool from GIGABYTE. There's no need to install it.
2) In the source option select your disc drive
3) In the destination path pick your USB drive.
4) Make sure the 'add USB drivers' option is selected
5) Click start and wait for the process to finish.

Note: if you just need to add the USB drivers to an existing ISO you can do that from the source option.

Monday, September 7, 2015

The GIGABYTE Z97 Last Hurrah wrapped up last week and now the results are official.

We would like to congratulate Xtreme Addict and Arhaam for winning the contest. Xtreme Addict took first place in the Extreme Cooling category with 79 points and won a GIGABYTE Z170X-SOC Force motherboard. Arhaam won the ambient cooling category with 73 points and is also taking home a GIGABYTE Z170X-SOC Force board.

Friday, September 4, 2015

Heroes of the Storm™ is one of the hottest games to come out of Blizzard® in a long time. Using familiar gameplay mechanics found in games such as DOTA, Heroes of the Storm allows players to battle it out with their favorite characters from the Blizzard universe. The game is free-to-play and supported by micro-transactions for in-game character upgrades.

Heroes of the Storm will be one of the highlights of Blizzard's BlizzCon expo which kicks off in November in Anaheim, California. GIGABYTE is the official motherboard partner of BlizzCon and we want to send you to the show!

While supplies last, when you purchase select GIGABYTE motherboards you are eligible for participation in the sweepstakes where you could instantly win a variety of prizes including a Kerrigan hero, a Succubus skin and a GRAND PRIZE Trip to Anaheim, CA to attend BlizzCon® 2015.

Thursday, September 3, 2015

The GIGABYTE Z170X-Gaming G1 motherboard certainly is an exciting product, and one of the most interesting parts on the board is the Killer Wireless AC-1535 controller from Rivet Networks.

Wireless network controllers are a part that's often forgotten about on the motherboard. For the most part they work, and work well, so that's good enough for most users. However, the Killer Wireless AC-1535 brings a load of new features that goes above and beyond what a standard built-in adapter can offer.

Virtually across the board, the Killer Wireless-AC 1535 outpaced the Intel solution. To give some examples, when using the Nighthawk X6 router in the real-world environment, and connected at a range of 5M, the Killer NIC offered up 676.28Mbs to Intel’s 666.9Mb/s. At 15 meters the Killer NIC offered 607.6Mb/s to the Intel controller’s 508.2Mb/s. And at 25M, the delta remained significant—399.1MB/s to 338.8MBs. When connected to a Linksys E8500 in a real-world environment, the numbers are similar. The Killer Wireless-AC 1535 offered up 622.9, 635.6, and 499.5MB/s, at 5M, 15M, and 25M, respectively, to the Intel 7265’s 621.8, 608.7, and 454MB/s. Performance in the clean environment showed similar, and sometimes larger, deltas in the Killer’s favor, though the real-world numbers are far more likely to mirror what an end-user is going to see (and be able to reproduce) on their own network.

For the next few hours Dinos22 will be livestreaming an OC tutorial and answering your questions. Check it out on YouTube Gaming! If you like what you see let us know and we'll be sure to do more livestreams in the future.